Responsible Environmental Behavior, Energy Conservation, and Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But Can You Make It Drink?

Despite professing to care about the environment and supporting environmental causes, individuals behave in environmentally irresponsible ways like driving when they can take public transportation, littering, or disposing of toxic materials in unsound ways. This is the author\u27s fourth exploration of how to encourage individuals to stop behaving irresponsibly about the environment they allege to care deeply about. The prior three articles all explored how the norm of environmental protection could be enlisted in this effort; this article applies those theoretical conclusions to the very practical task of getting people to switch the type of light bulb they use. To accomplish this, the article synthesizes the previous articles into an assumption about the critical role of norms in changing personal behavior and tests that assumption by exploring how to make individuals more responsible consumers of electricity and adhere to the concrete norm of energy conservation by swapping out their incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent lights (“CFLs”). The agreed upon goal behind energy conservation is to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuel-based energy production, thus reducing the emission of harmful airborne pollutants and greenhouse gases as well as the related environmental harms associated with coal production. One way to reduce residential energy consumption is to persuade individuals to switch to CFLs. Up to ninety percent of energy produced by incandescent bulbs is lost as heat; switching to CFLs is one way to prevent this energy loss

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity in content quality and variety, the degree of success will depend on incentives to contribute a desirable mix of quality and variety ("getting \emph{good} stuff in"). Third, because UCC systems generally function as open-access publishing platforms, there is a need to prevent or reduce the amount of negative value (polluting or manipulating) content. The work to date on incentives problems facing UCC is limited and uneven in coverage. Much of the empirical research concerns specific settings and does not provide readily generalizable results. And, although there are well-developed theoretical literatures on, for example, the private provision of public goods (the "getting stuff in" problem), this literature is only applicable to UCC in a limited way because it focuses on contributions of (homogeneous) money, and thus does not address the many problems associated with heterogeneous information content contributions (the "getting \emph{good} stuff in" problem). We believe that our review of the literature has identified more open questions for research than it has pointed to known results.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100229/1/icd4ucc.pdf7

Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Organisations: The Case of Open Source Software Communities

The knowledge-based economy, where everything and everybody is just one click away, has formed the foundation for a new organisational form. The term ‘virtual organisation’ (VO) reflects the emergence of a new organisational form with a record of success in the modern business environment, where knowledge has become a key component. Managing knowledge is the main driver in the knowledge-based economy. One of the best examples of such organisational forms with successful knowledge sharing processes is open source software (OSS) communities. This justifies my thesis, which undertakes primary research in OSS communities via qualitative and quantitative studies to find out how and to what extent knowledge is shared in those communities, in order to develop a Model for successful knowledge sharing processes in the VOs. The following factors in the Model, which influence the level of personal contribution in the OSS communities, were found. The level of personal contribution as an indicator to knowledge sharing for product innovation is a result of a combination of individual factors as well as individual opinion on the organisational factors. Factors such as an education level/explicit knowledge, incentives/benefits for the future and monetary reward do not play a role on their own, but they influence the level of roles and the level of activeness, which in turn influence the level of knowledge sharing, which is important for the level of personal contribution on product innovation. Personal and work related motivations are important factors to successful knowledge sharing inside OSS communities. However, most importantly, the level of personal contribution towards product innovation is a result of the satisfaction of individuals by the management of the OSS communities, identification with these communities and trust inside of these communities. The developed Model shows that organisational factors are more important than individual factors for successful knowledge sharing inside OSS communities from an individual’s perspective

A multi-method inquiry on online communities

This dissertation studies the behavioral characteristics of participants engaged in information exchange in the context of online communities. Online communities are defined as collectives of individuals that use computer mediated communication to facilitate interaction over a shared purpose and/or objective. It is argued that this interaction creates externalities, for example, in the form of codified information that others can use through web search tools. These externalities assemble a virtual form of social capital, a commonly shared resource. The research objective of this thesis is to examine how the behavioral tendencies of the participants in online communities are affected by the way this common resource is formatted, administered and shared. The dissertation consists of two parts: a theoretical part where the empirical background and the object of research inquiry is highlighted, and an empirical part which consists of four empirical studies carried out in the context of three online communities, namely, Google Answers, Yahoo!Answers and Amazon Online Reviews. The empirical part of this dissertation starts with a controlled experiment emulating a well known social dilemma: the public goods game. It provides substance as to whether and when participants in online communities behave (un) cooperatively. The next two studies focus on a special case of online communities where participants ask questions and other participants post answers conditionally on social and monetary incentives. The results of these two studies confirm that community participants do care about the contributions of others and engage in incentive compatible behavior. Yahoo!Answers participants exercise effort in the community by posting answers to questions conditionally on benefits provided by other participants. The empirical findings show that contributing participants in an online community receive answers faster, while those that do not contribute much effort are sanctioned in the form of longer response-time to their questions. In Google Answers this thesis, interactions can be observed that are based on monetary rewards (rather than social rewards in the form of a reputation index as in Yahoo Answers). Participants make use of voluntarily awarded payoffs (tips) along with stated rewards, in order to motivate those that provide answers (answerers) to provide better quality in their responses. The findings of this study confirm the symmetric effect between monetary rewards and quality. However, this study also identifies cases where social norms have a significant effect on response behavior. When participants seek to get better service with less effort (in terms of total cost), a reputation index which is constructed by the history of their previous interactions supports such an attempt. In other words, reputation history influences information sharing behavior in online communities. The last chapter of the empirical part focuses on another crucial aspect of information as a shared resource: Clarity and understandability. The study examines online product reviews on Amazon.com. The results suggest that participants do care about the clarity of this codified form of experience which increases a helpfulness index accordingly. The thesis overall finds symmetric effects between participation in online communities and output of interaction, but also identifies the ability of the participants to interact strategically as they seek to minimize the effort they provide in order to find the information they seek. The results underline the importance of signaling and quality evaluation mechanisms as counter-balancing control that can enhance activity on online communities